The instant

The instant is not a self-contained speck of time but the possibility of a break in the continuity of a person’s project. In Sartre’s account, it comes into being when a fundamental choice changes radically: a new project makes the former one past, takes the present as its beginning, and projects a future that gives this beginning its meaning. The instant is thus at once an ending and a beginning, a rupture produced within temporal continuity rather than a unit from which time is assembled.

Against a succession of moments

During an ongoing task, consciousness does not ordinarily encounter itself as a sequence of isolated instants. Sartre describes it instead as a perpetual pursued-pursuit toward ends that define it: while writing, for example, the writer is absorbed in trying to grasp and order ideas that will form the basis of the work. The activity is a continuous movement toward its ends, not a succession of self-contained present moments.

That continuity does not make the instant an empty philosophical invention. A person is perpetually threatened by it because freedom always leaves open the possibility of breaking the unity of the existing project. The instant names this possibility of rupture, not a hidden temporal particle waiting to be discovered inside ordinary action. It becomes psychologically significant because the ongoing project can be interrupted and reorganized by a new choice.

The structure of a beginning and an end

An instant cannot simply be identified with the first or last term of a process. A beginning belongs to the process it begins, yet is limited by what precedes it; an ending belongs to the process it terminates, yet is limited by what follows. Each term is integrated into its process in one direction and bounded by nothingness in the other. A possible instant must combine both conditions: it is a beginning limited by a prior nothingness and an end limited by a posterior nothingness.

This double boundary becomes concrete when the end of one project coincides with the beginning of another. The transition is not an abstract point imposed in advance on every process of temporalization. It arises when a prior process collapses and another takes its place. For the new beginning to count as an instant, it must itself be given as the ending of the project it makes past. The person is therefore both beginning and end to themself within a single act.

Radical choice and the future

A radical modification of the fundamental project produces this structure. By freely choosing a new project, a person temporalizes the being they have chosen and comes to know that being through a future. The present of the choice belongs to the newly begun whole, but it receives its character as a beginning from the future that has just opened. Without that future-directed meaning, the present would be merely a present, not a beginning.

At the same time, the choice determines itself in relation to the past it has to be. A converted atheist, for instance, is not simply a believer: the person is a believer who has rejected atheism and made the former project past. The new choice is consequently a beginning insofar as it ends the old project, and an ending insofar as it begins the new one. It breaks the unity of temporalization, although the instant itself is nothingness: what can be apprehended on either side is a continuous temporalization, either the completed series that has just passed or the living process beginning under the pull of a future possibility.

Continuity, recovery, and rupture

A fundamental choice defines the direction of the pursued-pursuit, but it does not provide an initial thrust that can thereafter be relied on as settled. The choice is continuously recovered through freedom. That recovery does not occur from instant to instant, since there are no such independent moments; it is joined so closely to the whole process that it has no instantaneous meaning. Yet the very freedom that continually recovers the choice also limits it: the possibility of choosing otherwise haunts the project as the specter of the instant.

As a process becomes past, it remains organized with the present in the form of practical knowing—lived and interiorized meaning rather than an object explicitly before consciousness. Freedom nonetheless makes it possible to posit the immediate past as an object, evaluate it, and take bearings from it. This objectification of the past occurs with the choice of different ends and helps cause the instant to spring forth as a nihilating rupture in temporalization. A changed direction does not merely follow a completed past; the new choice makes that past an object and reconfigures its meaning in relation to the future.

Conceptual significance

The instant brings the account of freedom, choice, and time into a single structure. It is not a recurring atom at which a person must renew a choice, but the possible break that a new project creates within a continuous temporal life. Its double character—beginning and end—explains how a radical choice can both inherit a past and establish a different future, while never escaping the continuity of the process in which it occurs.

The concept also distinguishes the lived temporal movement of action from the retrospective clarity of a decisive change. In the midst of a task, consciousness is directed toward its ends; when a new project arises, the former direction can be apprehended as past and the present can acquire the status of a beginning. The instant is therefore neither a mere boundary on a clock nor a detached act of will: it is the point-like appearance of a rupture whose reality depends on the larger, continuous temporalization that it interrupts and redirects.